Auditory science: How the brain handles ‘the cocktail party problem’

Sara Carta & Giovanni Di Liberto Imagine you are at a crowded cocktail party. People are coming and going, yet you can follow your friend as they share some juicy gossip. The fact that you can follow what they are saying is down to your brain performing complex operations amid all the noise. Out of all the sound waves reaching your ears, it successfully isolates the one of interest while filtering out the rest..Trying to understand how the brain does this has occupied auditory neuroscientists since the 1950s, when British cognitive scientist Colin Cherry coined the term “the cocktail party problem”. Early experiments asked volunteers to listen to two speeches simultaneously but repeat only one aloud. Cherry found that listeners could follow the pre-selected message remarkably well, despite both speeches playing at the same time, one in each ear.